Arun Kumar Bajaj has a very unusual skill – he can paint with a sewing machine. Technically, it’s embroidering, not painting, but his artworks are so incredibly detailed that they could pass as hyper-realistic paintings to the untrained eye. And the fact that he does it all with a sewing machine just makes it that much more impressive.

Arun was really good at drawing and painting growing up and dreamed of becoming a famous painter, but his father’s sudden death, 15 years ago, foiled his plans and forced him to abandon school in order to run the family business. His father was a tailor and he became one too, but he didn’t let the artist in him die. Instead, he started “painting” with needle and thread, but instead of using his hands, he decided on a rather unusual embroidering tool – the sewing machine. It took him a while to master this unique art form, but today he is recognized as the world’s only sewing machine artist.

Georgina Ryland, a makeup artist and beauty blogger from Brisbane, Australia, creates incredible body art using her own body as the canvas.

We’ve all seen impressive body art before, but what sets Georgina Ryland’s works from those of other talented body painters is that she actually paints the artworks on her own body, instead of using a model. All I can tell you about the artistic process is that it involves using a mirror, as well as a steady hand and mountains of patience. I for one can’t understand how she can paint backwards, by looking in a mirror, but judging by the quality of her work, she’s gotten really good at it.

Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

Asia Eriksen, a horror enthusiast from Coaldale, Pennsylvania, has found an intriguing way of combining her artistic talent and her passion for horror – she spends weeks, sometimes even month,s creating custom werewolf babies called “werepups”.

34-year-old Asia Eriksen got the idea for her creepy Werepups as a child. The horror flick Silver Bullet got her really interested in werewolves, and at one point she started thinking about having a baby werewold for a pet. However, the horror enthusiast had no idea that she would end up making her childhood fantasy a reality herself, until she met her husband, who worked in special effects. Asia started experimenting with his materials and at one point made her first werepup sculpture, which her husband turned into a mould. The artist recalls that, at the time, she was just making the toy she had dreamed of as a child, not knowing that others would be interested in it. Today, werepups are so sought-after by horror fans that Eriksen can hardly keep up with demand.

A French street artist has found a way to bring Bitcoin to the art world. By incorporating QR codes in his murals, he is able to receive donations directly from passers-by who appreciate his artworks.

Pascal ‘PBOY’ Boyart started adding Bitcoin QR codes to his street murals in November 2017, and he has so far received over $1,000 in cryptocurrency donations from people who just wanted to show their appreciation and support for his art. The donation system is extremely simple and fast – anyone with a smartphone and a Bitcoin wallet can just scan the QR code in the mural and transfer funds directly to the artist. Boyart isn’t sure if he is the first artist to use this system, but he definitely sees others relying on decentralised currencies going forward, as it cuts the middlemen – art galleries or crowdfunding platforms – allowing artists to directly connect to their audience.

A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

In what the local community has named a ‘catastrophe’, a museum in Elne, Southern France, dedicated to the work of painter Etienne Terrus recently discovered that at least 82 of its 140 artworks were actually fakes.

The Terrus museum in Elne had bought the paintings, drawings and watercolors over a period of 20 years, for a total price of around 160,000 euros ($193,000), but concerns regarding their authenticity were raised only recently. Art historian Eric Forcada, who was entrusted with overseeing the entire Terrus collection while the small museum was being renovated, apparently noticed that some of the buildings depicted in the artworks had been built after the artist’s death, so they couldn’t possibly have been painted by him. But the buildings that weren’t supposed to appear in Terrus artworks led the historian to more unusual discoveries.

Jelly cakes don’t really sound very appetizing, or particularly impressive for that matter, but that’s only because you’ve probably never seen one of Siew Heng Boon’s amazing 3D jelly cakes.

Intricately-designed 3D jelly cakes are really popular in South-East Asian countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, and in Mexico, but some of the world’s most amazing such edible masterpieces are actually created by an Australian artist from Sidney. Siew Heng Boon has been making 3D jelly cakes for only two years now, but she’s already considered a master of the trade, and her incredible creations often have people do a double take.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

A Chinese art student sparked a heated debate online after using the wings of over 500 butterflies to create a series of artworks symbolizing rebirth. While some consider her “sick” for using butterfly wings as an art medium, others think her creations qualify as original art.

Li Zheng, a fourth-year art student at Quanzhou Normal University in Fujian province, China, created a series of artworks consisting of meticulously arranged butterfly wings as part of her graduation piece. She and her colleagues were instructed by their lecturer to recreate famous artworks using different materials. Li decided she wanted to recreate some of the masterpieces of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, but at first, she had no idea what materials she was going to use.

When it comes to metallic wire artworks, you’ll have a tough time finding a more talented artist than @tdaiki1216, a young Japanese art graduate who seems able to twist copper and brass wire into pretty much anything he sets his mind to, from sculptures that look like drawn manga, to slithering snakes and giant insects.

@tdaiki1216, whose real name is Tsutamoto Dawiki, first made headlines in Japan two years ago, when his incredibly detailed wire sculptures imitating manga drawings went viral on Twitter. Fixed into square wooden blocks and placed against a white background, his artworks looked exactly like manga comics, even though they were actually twisted pieces of wire. Those were impressive enough, but @tdaiki1216 has stepped up his game even more over these last few years, and is now specializing in more complex wire sculptures, some of which are simply mind-blowing.

From afar, Phil Vance’s typography portraits look like expertly drawn artworks, but as you draw nearer to them, you start to see that every feature is actually made up of handwritten text. Once you start deciphering all the words, you realize they are famous quotes of the subject written over and over again. The talented artist describes his art as “cross-hatching but with words.”

Monika Falčik, a 22-year-old makeup junky from Lithuania, has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately for her impressive optical illusions, using face paint and makeup to make her face look warped, sliced or detached from her head.

Falčik has been getting some attention on Instagram for a while now, by posting mainly makeup and travel related photos, but her number of followers skyrocketed once she started posting facial optical illusions, late last year. It all started on Halloween, when Monika decided to use some of the tricks she had learned watching makeup and special effects tutorials on YouTube to give herself a creepy look for the holiday. She got huge feedback from her Instagram followers, and she’s been treating them to various optical illusions ever since.

From stain remover to mouthwash replacement, saltwater has many uses in our everyday lives, and thanks to Japanese self-taught artist Mai Hirashima, we can also add ‘art medium’ to the list as well.

Mai Hirashima uses saltwater as paint, carefully applying it on black paper canvases, using small brushes and thin bamboo skewers, and then applying heat to cause the water to evaporate and the salt crystallize in the desired shape. It’s a laborious and time-consuming process, but the results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

When it comes to steampunk-inspired wristwatches, I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen anything quite like the ones Japanese designer FRISK_P makes. To say her creations are steampunk masterpieces almost feels like an understatement, and once you see her work in action, I’m pretty sure you’ll agree.

FRISK_P’s mission is “to make wristwatches that nobody else makes”. They are definitely not the most practical wristwatches, nor the most compact ones, but in terms of uniqueness and wow-factor, they are on a whole other level.